Seth Godin has a way of always hitting the nail on the head.  In the past couple of days he has written two blog posts that I really liked.  Rather than dissect them for you, I’ll just provide the links and you judge for yourself.

Blog post number one is about how Congress needs to facilitate an orderly bankruptcy of the Big Three automakers.  It seemed a little controversial at first, but once I read the whole thing, I liked it. Here’s the link: What to do About Detroit.

Blog post number two is about how to make money on the Internet.  I’m not sure there is any new info contained in this blog post, but Seth has a way of detailing it in a way that really makes a lot of sense.  Here’s the link:  How to make money on the Internet.

I’ve spent most of the past three days trying to learn to build a website.  As I posted previously, I purchased Dreamweaver with the hope of being able to build websites for some of my keyword domains.  I’ve also purchased XSitePro2 and I downloaded a free copy of XHeader.  At the moment, I’m really no closer than I was before to being able to build a website.

This is frustrating.  I know it can’t be that hard.  But I get hung up on the most basic elements of the website (building a header, tweaking a template, etc).  Ahhhh…

I’m going to keep at it, but it really is frustrating.  I know it’s not supposed to be this hard.

Last week, Elliot Silver wrote a blog post about a website he created in just four hours.  The website, ChainCatshark.com, was created using a free template from FreeCSSTemplates.org, a public domain image from Wikipedia.com, and he put it all together using Dreamweaver.

Elliot was inspired to do this by his friend Stephen Kennedy who spent an afternoon creating a simple website at SpiderMonkeys.com.  Elliot wrote about Stephen’s experience here.  For his site, Stephen used XSitePro2 and XHeader.  I don’t know much about these two programs, but it looks like XSitePro2 is an easy-to-use website design program that can be purchased for just $197 and XHeader, a header design program, can be downloaded free.

Elliot and Stephen both created their websites with the thought of providing unique, relevant content on their chosen subjects and then monetizing their sites using PPC ads.  Both of their examples prove that web development doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming.

In response to Elliot’s blog post, Amber Dusick asked the question why someone would want to build a website in one afternoon and then move on to other pursuits.  Her point was that if you have a passion for a certain topic, why not take the time it requires to build a full-scale site and become the expert in that niche. As an example, Amber has built out two websites (Do-It-Yourself-Weddings.com and Make-Baby-Stuff.com), each of which took her about a year to create.  However, Amber says that she now only spends about an hour or two per month to maintain the sites, but her sites are in the top 1% of all websites for generating traffic.  In fact, these two websites earn Amber a full-time income.

Elliot responded to Amber saying that a domain investor who owns hundred or thousands of domains doesn’t have time to spend a year developing each domain to the extent Amber built her websites.  Instead, domain investors are looking for a way to quickly build websites and monetize them.

There is no wrong way to develop a domain.  Your end goal will determine your approach.  Elliot wanted to show how easy it could be to develop a domain using a mini-site when he built out ChainCatshark.com.  Amber wanted to earn a full-time living from a website she was passionate about.  The way they developed their websites was determined by what they wanted to accomplish.

One of the people that commented to Elliot’s post made the point that Google will not show any love to Elliot’s site for two reasons.  First, because it is a website on a newly purchased domain (Elliot bought the domain specifically for this experiment), Google will “sandbox” the site and it will not rank in the top 100 listings for the keywords Elliot chose for at least a few months.  Also, the commenter said that Elliot will only get 4 cents per click for a few months because of the domain being newly purchased.  His explanation was that when you first build a website on a brand new domain and you put AdSense ads on the website, Google assumes you are some sort of spammer.

Elliot responded by stating that his site was ranked at #10 for Chain Catshark and #5 for Chain Cat Shark.  This was on 11-9-08.  He also said that he had received one click and it paid him $2.97.  Today (11/15/08) Elliot’s site is #6 for Chain Catshark and #4 for Chain Cat Shark.  I’ve heard a lot of things about how Google treats new websites, but I don’t know what is true and what isn’t.  In this case, it doesn’t appear that Elliot suffered for having a new domain, a new website, or for having AdSense ads.

The bottom line is that it doesn’t have to cost a fortune or take forever to develop a website, especially if you are building a smaller site.  You just need the right tools, a little time, and some creativity.  So what’s my excuse?  I’m still trying to figure that out.

I’ve been traveling the past two weeks and I haven’t kept up with the blog the way I would like.  Unfortunately, today I’m a bit under the weather and don’t feel much like writing.  So instead, I’ll take advantage of my considerable cut and paste skills to share with you Steve Jobs 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Stanford University:

 

“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

 

The first story is about connecting the dots.

 

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

 

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

 

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

 

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

 

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

 

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

 

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

 

My second story is about love and loss.

 

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

 

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

 

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

 

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

 

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

 

My third story is about death.

 

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

 

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

 

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

 

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

 

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

 

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

 

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

 

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

 

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

 

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

 

Thank you all very much.”

I am inept when it comes to the technical side of web design and development.  I don’t know how to build websites, I don’t know html coding, and I am extremely challenged when it comes to designing even the simplest website.  The only skill I have (if in fact it is a skill) is the ability to generate a ton of ideas. 

I have a lot of ideas.  I have a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas.  I have so many ideas that I doubt if I will live long enough to act on all of them.  That’s what I bring to the table.  Past that, I’m pretty much lost.

Because of my limitations, I feel guilty; maybe even a little stupid.  I want to be able to build a website.  I want to have enough  technical knowledge so that even if I hire a developer to build the website, I’ll know what he’s doing and I’ll be able to speak his language.  Toward that end, I recently purchased Dreamweaver.  I also bought a video training course.

I did okay during the first several lessons, but then I started to get lost and frustrated.  I’m not a patient man and once I started getting lost, I simply decided I was wasting my time and gave up.  Another expensive lesson learned.

But I’m re-thinking my position.  Maybe I just need to apply myself a little more.  Maybe I need to give Dreamweaver another try.

There are two schools of thought on this matter.  One school says it is good to take the time to learn new things.  This school prefers “well rounded” people; favoring generalists over specialists.  The other school says stick with your strengths (in my case, idea creation) and pay someone else to do the things you don’t know how to do or don’t want to do.  But which school is correct?  What do you think?

There are basically three levels of domain monetization.  At the lowest level you have domain parking, above that is mini-site development, and the highest level of domain monetization is full scale development.

As I’ve stated several times, I don’t like parking.  I don’t think it is a good use for a domain (especially a good domain) and I don’t believe it provides much in the way of value for the user.  Plus, parking revenue is on the decline and I don’t foresee it increasing in the future.

Mini-sites were a great idea, at least in theory.  The theory was that if you put good, original, relevant content on a site, you could get your site indexed on the search engines.  Monetization would be primarily through PPC ads, although affiliate programs are also a possibility.  In practice, min-sites haven’t turned out to be quite the pancea they were advertised to be.

I’ve tried three different mini-site companies.  First, I shifted some medical domains away from parking to WhyPark.com.  For $99 WhyPark applies computer-generated websites to my domains.  The cost is cheap and the websites look okay.  Not great, but okay.  The content is fairly relevant (non-relevant articles sometimes creep in) and is pulled from free article databases.

The problem with the domains I have at WhyPark.com is that 1) they have not gotten indexed on Google, and 2) they’re not generating hardly any income. 

The one saving grace for WhyPark.com is that their service has been very good.  We’re working to increase the income these domains are generating, but so far we haven’t hit the sweet spot.

I’ve also had aeiou.com build a couple of mini-sites for me.  The cost for each site was $250, but I justified the cost by realizing that the sites were hand-built (as opposed to computer generated), the content was original (as opposed to being pulled from a free article database), and the chances of being indexed on the search engines was increased. 

The mini-sites aeiou.com built for me are very attractive.  Unfortunately, the original content was very poorly written.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m guessing that aeiou.com outsources the writing of the content to writers who don’t speak English very well.  At least that’s the way it came across to me.

Also, my sites have not been indexed on the search engines.  However, in defense of aeiou.com, it is still fairly early so this may eventually happen.

Let me also say that the service I have received from aeiou.com has been terrific.  I’ve dealt with Ryan Steel and Ryan Hogrefe.  Both have been very good to work with and very helpful. 

I tried to give EVOLandnig.com a try, but things didn’t work out.  I wanted to try a few domains with EVOLanding just to get a feel for them, but their sales manager encouraged me to send them my entire portfolio.  I resisted, he insisted.  Finally, I sent him a partial list of domains.  That was the last I heard from him.  I followed up with an email, but I never received a response. 

I guess I shouldn’t be too upset.  According to Leonard Holmes of ParkQuick.com,

“Like other domainers, I had high hopes for EvoLanding.  In most cases their sites looked really great.  I parked around 70 domains with them some months back and I was pleased with the content-rich sites that were created.  Their business model seems to be automated content creation that includes media such as video.  They urged me to keep my domains there so they would gradually build traffic and income.  It never happened.”

In his newsletter, Leonard goes on to quote a domainer named Christine who had the following to say about EVOLanding:

“I had just under 100 domains at EVOlanding from April to September 2008.  I finally moved them back to a reliable parking company.  I had high hopes for EVOlanding, but it was a huge let-down.  Their support was okay for the first week or so, then it was like they just forgot about me and my domains.  I had a couple of very premium domains, which they ‘developed’ first.  But the rest of the domains got the basic, automated setup treatment and never showed any sign of being ‘upgraded’ each time they supposedly improved their program.

 

“Generally, I have to say their support sucks, they won’t ‘develop’ your domains unless you hound them, and - perhaps most important - the revenues generated from their ‘mini-sites’ is absolutely pathetic.  I have a highly searched entertainment keyword domain that gets type-in traffic and over all these months it has generated less than $20.  When it was at a regular parking company, it was pulling in more than $150 each month.

 

This domain used to be on the first page of Google search results, but having been with EVOlanding, now it doesn’t show up at all.  Also, the domains have not picked up any PR and very few, if any, back links, and the sites do not get indexed.  You will be far better off either parking your domains with a company that has a longer reputation or by developing them into mini-sites yourself.”

So I am moving on.  I’ve split my domains up into those I’m going to develop, those I’m going to sell, and those I’m going to hold (i.e. good domains with future potential, but no current plans). 

I had high hopes for mini-sites.  They seemed like the perfect answer to low (or decreasing) parking revenues and high development costs.  Unfortunately, the mini-site craze has not turned out to be as promising as I had hoped.  They may change in the future, but for now I’ll be focusing on developing my sites.

NOTE: A new player has entered the mini-site arena.  SiteGraduate.com is a relatively new venture run by Bradley Epstein and Sean Stafford.  Elliot Silver did a profile of SiteGraduate in this blog post.  I have high hopes for SiteGraduate, but I think I’ll be holding off to see if they can really deliver what they promise.

I was going to write about something else today, but I think there’s something more important I need to address.  Let me start by giving a little background.

I’m a middle-aged white guy who grew up in the Midwest.  I’ve had the opportunity in my life to live in six different states and meet a diverse group of people along the way.  Politically, I lean toward being conservative, although I pride myself on not falling in lock step with any particular political group. 

Barack Obama’s stand on the issues did not thrill me, although I have to admit that I respected and appreciated his hopeful rhetoric.  Sometimes, people (or an entire country) need a positive word to pump them up.  Likewise, although I have great respect for John McCain’s military service and his service in the senate, I didn’t care for many of his proposed policies.  The point is, I’m not a booster for either major candidate.

Having said that, I was awed by Obama’s victory last night.  It is still hard for me to fully comprehend the historical significance of an African-American being elected to the highest office in the land.  During my life, I have witnessed discrimination against African-Americans both egregious and subtle.  I did not think that I would see a black man elected to the Presidency of the United State in my lifetime.  I didn’t think most Americans were enlightened enough to allow it to happen.  I didn’t think that either of the major political parties would “waste” their nomination on a candidate who surely couldn’t win.  I didn’t think white Americans would vote in the numbers necessary to elect an African-American candidate.  As it turns out, I underestimated Americans and I was wrong.

I don’t know what kind of President Barack Obama is going to be.   I don’t know for sure if he will be wildly successful, fail miserably, or end up somewhere in between.  What I do know is that I am extremely proud to live in a country that would elect a man like Barack Obama and I’m extremely grateful to have witnessed his election in my lifetime.  My fervent hope is that my children fully understand the impact of Barack Obama’s election and that someday they will explain this election to their children, and their children will have a hard time understanding why anyone’s skin color would affect their ability to get elected.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged my the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

                                                                                    — Martin Luther King

I drove through Kentucky yesterday and purposely did not spend a dime.  I didn’t buy any gas, no fast food, and I refused to purchase a Diet Coke, even though I was thirsty.  That will teach Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear to illegally confiscate domain names.

To read more about the boycott, Rick Schwartz (The Domain King) has written about it here.

The official Boycott Kentucky website is here.

Michael Berkens of TheDomains.com has written a terrific post concerning how registrars take advantage of their position by acquiring their customers dropped domains and then sell them for huge profits.  In particular, Michael has taken Tucows to task for doing this.

Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows wrote a response to Michael and then Elliot and others have kept the conversation going in the comments.  The post and comments can be found here.

The bottom line to this issue is plain to me.  When a registrar takes possession of their customers’ dropped domains and then profits from the sale of those domains, it is wrong.  It doesn’t matter that all registrars are doing it and it doesn’t matter that Tucows is more transparent than other registrars.  It is still wrong.

If a domainer drops a domain, whether intentionally or not, the domain should go back and be available to all domainers for the registration price.  The domain should not be held by a registrar (warehousing) and it should not be auctioned off by the registrar.  Once the domain is dropped, the registrar who registered it previously should have no more claim on the domain than any other registrar.

If the system was run in this manner, registrars would have an incentive to remind their customers that the domain is coming up for renewal.  They’d have an incentive to help their customer in any way possible to hold on to the domain.  If the domain owner has no desire to keep the domain, then the domain should be dropped and become available for hand registration.

As it stands now, registrars have an incentive to NOT help their customers to renew their domains.  In fact, they have an incentive to make it difficult for their customer to renew their domains.  It is a corrupt business model that encourages a business to work against their own customers’ interests.  Yet, this is exactly the business model followed by Tucows and other registrars.

Any registrar that both registers domains for their customers and profits when their customer “forgets” to renew their domain has an obvious conflict of interest on their hands.  And although Tucows seems rather proud of the fact that they are more up front and transparent about their conflict of interest, it doesn’t make their conflict of interest any less conflicted.

Sometimes in life, there are things that are right and there are things that are wrong.  Not everything is in the gray zone.  And no matter how transparent you are or how many other people are doing it or how much money you can make doing it, if it’s wrong, it’s wrong.  

THOUGHT: If the doctor performing your surgery also owns the local funeral home, you should probably find another doctor.

Evil-doers are sending out phishing attacks to domain owners incorrectly notifying them that they are about to lose a domain due to inaccurate whois information.  The emails are made to look like they are coming from Enom.com.

The evil-doers are also sending out emails supposedly from Network Solutions.com.  These emails indicate that the domain registration has expired.  The domain owner is asked to click on a link and is then taken to a fraudulent site where the user is asked to provide some personal information. 

With all of these phishing scams, the domain name where the email originates and where the link takes the user is similar, but obviously different than the actual registrar website. Check the domain name before you provide any personal info.

Thanks to Michael Berkens at TheDomains.com for bringing this problem to our attention.  You can read Michael’s full post here.